Banking.io
Banking.io is a book I'm writing about the architecture of money — how financial systems are actually built, why the ones we have are being quietly unbundled, and what replaces the bank when money becomes programmable and intelligence becomes autonomous.
The argument, in one line: for five thousand years money was a noun — something you hold. It is becoming a verb — something that executes. When value can carry its own logic and software agents can act on it without us, banking stops being a place and becomes a layer. This book is about who builds that layer, how trust moves from institutions into protocols and models, and what should stay a human responsibility even when it no longer has to.
It draws on more than a decade of building financial infrastructure — from credit scoring for the unbanked to banking-as-a-service rails — and on a simple conviction: banking is necessary, banks are not.
The shape of the argument
The headline thesis is the one the book's own site opens with: banking is not being disrupted — it is being absorbed. Twelve protocols carry one structural argument:
- The Death of Traditional Banking
- Money as Code
- Why Banks Will Become Platforms
- The End of Financial Intermediaries
- Programmable Money and the Future of Debt
- The Rise of AI Financial Agents
- Trust Architecture in the Digital Age
- Fintech After the Platform Revolution
- The Operating System of Global Finance
- Banking in the Age of Autonomous Intelligence
- The Seven Layers of the Agentic Bank
- When Money Thinks
Several of these threads have hardened into the working vocabulary on this site — programmable money, trust architecture, the absorption thesis, and the agentic bank all began as protocols.
Who it's for
It is written from the operator's seat, not the analyst's: for people who build, run, regulate, or bet on financial systems — and for readers who suspect that the most consequential changes in money are happening in the plumbing, below the level the product announcements describe.
Status
In progress. The book has its own home at banking.io — read the thesis, see the protocols, and subscribe there for updates. I'm publishing essays from the draft as I go; the pieces below are early excerpts, also carried by this site's feed. No publication date yet; it ships when the argument is finished, not before.